Light’s rise sparks bright blooms:
birdsong, fields of it, vining–
spring’s first green flourish.
These mornings, I step outside my back door to hear the hush of winter thrown off by a clamor of birdsong–the crackle of starlings, jazzy riffs of purple house finches, a lonely two-syllable call from a flycatcher, screeches [...]
I love stories like this.
The “Wow-ee!” response of the scientists involved would make for an interesting study, as well as the “maybe it’s the first example of invertebrate tool use but maybe it isn’t” facet of the story.
Everything is smarter than we think and has the prospect of becoming smarter, including us, if we could [...]
I’ve cross-posted this over at the onymous blog Times and Seasons in follow up to a three-part series I wrote there a couple years back. If you wish to read the original series, the introduction to the T&S post contains links to all three parts.
September 17th marked the two-year anniversary of the closing of Crossfire Canyon [...]
A few years back, after attending a local storytelling festival, I wondered in this post what would happen if I released a story into public domain. I resolved to work up the nerve to let go what some might imagine to be my intellectual property, to “breathe it out” into the common atmosphere, where anybody [...]
Brown-eyed boy tosses his black head,
Pokes his nose through the corral bars
Sniffing, searching for the apple slice
He knows, he knows I hide behind me.
I laugh, he bobs his head, steps close,
Knickers softly, lowers his head near my face.
He loves me for the apple he smells,
Its dappled red and yellow skin
Hints at dusty summer noons,
Evokes grass [...]
In Horse Opera, I told how a silver dun (also called grulla) mare helped protect and nurture a colt born this spring to another mare in my neighbor’s small herd. As I witnessed the social dynamics of the herd shift with the colt’s arrival, the grulla emerged to my awareness as an intelligent, loyal, and [...]
I thought it might be nice to make this Got Flight Week on WIZ’s People Month. Posts this week will play with the question: Can humans fly? If you’ve had a flying dream or other liberating experience related to flying, please, feel free to post it in comments to this post or others published this week [...]
A little over four and a half years ago my family moved from Payson City in Utah County to a new home at the desert’s edge in San Juan County, Utah. Living on the Colorado Plateau has been something of a dream come true. Besides reintroducing me to a more natural (for me) environment, living [...]
From time to time, someone asks why I don’t write about the meaner, nastier side of nature, especially the predator-prey drama. Until I go on that man-eating African lion-hunting trip or bag me an Alaskan grizzly or happen to be on hand when a puma takes down a mule deer buck, I just don’t have much to offer on [...]
Our homemade hummingbird feeders attach at approximately waist level to the two-by-four railing that runs around our second story porch. This puts the hummers down with us when they stop by for refreshers between bouts of very small game hunting. Once they arrive mid-April or so, we wind into the lives of these brilliant dynamos [...]